When the brush moves, water flows from a spring

In Tim Ingold's book Lines: a Brief History he quotes two writers on the history of Chinese calligraphy (Yenand Billeter) who describe the importance that has been attached to emulating nature - not in its forms, but in its movements. Sun Guoting, for example asked his readers to consider the difference between two strokes - the 'suspended needle' and the 'hanging-dewdrop' - and to draw inspiration from rolling thunder, toppling rocks, flying geese, animals in flight, dancing phoenixes, startled snakes, sheer cliffs, crumbling peaks, threatening clouds and cicadas wings. An earlier Jin Dynasty text, Lady Wei's Chart of Brush Manoeuvres (quoted by Yen, but not by Ingold), suggests that 'an elongated horizontal line should convey the openness of an array of clouds stretching for a thousand miles' whilst a dot should 'contain the energy of a rock from a mountain peak.' A sweeping stroke (na) should contain the 'orgiastic vigour of rolling waves, or crushing thunder and lightning.'

From Billeter's The Art of Chinese Writing Ingold gives five more examples:

A thirteenth-century master who compared the moment the brush makes contact with the paper to ‘the hare leaping and the hawk swooping down on its prey’

Another who in writing two particular characters tried to move his hand like a flying bird, and for two others imitated the 'somersaulting of rats at play'

The Sung Dynasty calligrapher Lei Chien-fu who 'described how he heard a waterfall, and imagined the water swirling, rushing and tumbling into the abyss. ‘I got up to write’, he recalled, ‘and all that I had imagined appeared beneath my brush''

Another Sung Dynasty calligrapher, Huang T’ing-chien (Huang Tingjian,
1045–1105), who only mastered a particular stroke after observing the
way boatmen on the Yangtze River angled their oars 'as they entered the
water, pulled through in the development of the stroke, and lifted them
out at the end, and how they put their whole body into the work'.

And a treatise on painting from the same period describing the way Wang Hsi-chih (or Wang Xizhi, 321-79) drew inspiration from geese, whose necks undulate like the wrist of the calligrapher

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This blog explores landscape through the arts: painting, installation, photography, literature, music, film... I've also on occasion covered the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers. For the first year I did several short entries each week; since then I have reduced the frequency and some posts are a bit longer. In naming this site 'Some Landscapes' initially I just saw it as a few modest notes and didn't know if I'd keep it up. Of course it will always only cover 'some' landscapes, even though I occasionally like to think of it as an expanding cultural gazetteer. There is a pretty long index (see above) listing the artists of all kinds that have been mentioned here. There are also maps and a chronology of posts. I started writing this blog using the name 'Plinius' (a little tribute to the younger and older Plinys) and am now rather attached to it as a 'nom de blog'. Comments are very welcome but are moderated to prevent spam. Plinus / Andrew Ray.